Please use your vote today. How you use it is up to you, although of course if you are in Scotland I’m sure you know what Munguin would advise you to do.

During the Blair and Brown years it was reasonable to say, nothing changes, voting doesn’t make any difference. They are all the same. It was untrue but totally understandable. Blair and Thatcher were only distinguishable by the lack of handbag in Blair’s wardrobe.

But today there is a choice. There’s a choice for the UK… it’s Corbyn or May. And they ARE different. And there is a choice for Scotland too. The SNP has made a difference in Westminster. OK, they can be, and often are, outvoted by the English, en masse. But you can count on 56 votes for decency. Can you imagine if there were Scottish MPs (apart from Muddle, who barely counts because he says what is programmed into him by whoever his boss is at the time) who were voting for rape clauses, and taking money away from disabled people, voting against pensioners’ rights and, as Ruth so clearly put it in her tweet of today:

If you are happy for your parents and grandparents to decide on how life is gonna be for the next 5 years of your life, and a great deal longer, given the momentous decisions that will be taken… and the ramifications of the great repeal bill… then don’t bother about this voting malarky today.

Leave it to your mum and dad, grandad and Auntie Gloria. They usually know best about most things, don’t they? Remember that sweater they bought you for Christmas?

OK. So according to Dean, the Daily Express and even some of the real press along with the BBC, the Tories won a victory on Thursday, and Scotland said no to independence, presumably preferring to be “strong and stable” with Brexit May and her chaotic bunch of clueless ministers. (Any bets on who will have to go after her election win?)

But, to be fair, the Tories did very well by their standards in Scotland. Since the days of Thatcher, they have been poison here. Playing down the “Conservative” name, the utter chaos of the Labour Party (for which the priority seems to be internecine warfare and voting along with whatever the government comes up with) and failing to talk about any actual policies except SNP BAAAAAD, have played well for them.

They made the election about the Union and about being “strong and stable”, whatever that actually means. (Seriously does anyone see Theresa May as being either strong or stable, or indeed anything other than a rather silly woman who sells weapons to Saudi, while ranting that NT left “Easter” out of their egg competition?) They made it about visceral hatred of the SNP, of independence, of the Greens, of Scotland as anything other than a region… So much so that none of us has any idea what their policies for local government are, although I’m pretty sure we can guess. As they don’t actually control any councils, at least we are sure that whatever they stand for will be tempered by decency and humanity.

1. The SNP won the election nationally, with the largest number of councillors and the highest vote share of any party.

2. They’ve won more councillors, with 431 elected compared to 425 in 2012.

3. The SNP is now the largest group in 16 of 32 councils.

4. The SNP has ended almost 40 years of Labour control in Glasgow, becoming the largest party in the city for the first time.

5. The SNP are now the largest party in Scotland’s four largest cities: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee.

And so now we move to the general election which in England they will fight on “strong and stable” leadership as they come out of Europe leaving chaos in their wake. In Scotland, they will fight on a “strong and stable” leadership for the union.

I’m not expecting to hear much about how some police officers and nurses are reliant upon Food Banks to feed their families, the sale of the NHS to Virgin, Tory electoral fraud, 40,000 deaths caused by pollution, war in the Middle East, abysmal trains, potholed roads, reduced pension, rising prices, thousands of deaths as a result of corruption in ATOS and their likes, sanctions, black hole in the incompetent Defence Minister’s budget, Mrs May’s closest, well, only, friends, Trump, Erdogan, Netanyahu, and Salman… etc, etc.

Interesting, Alex. I’ve looked for your profile on Facebook, but I can’t find it and so am unable to answer you directly. But, I want to help you out here so let me try to put your mind at rest.

“SNPers” don’t really take the debate away from the real issues, well no more than other voters do anyway. Because you see, we talk about things that are happening in our bit of what you call Great Britain. That’s Scotland. (Incidentally, Great Britain is the name of the big island comprising Scotland, Wales and England (along with Cornwall). Great being a translation from the French of “Grande” and Britain from “Bretagne” (so Large Brittany).

Actually, your country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. (At least for the moment.) Even if you dislike the Irish as much as you appear to dislike the Scots, you just can’t dismiss them completely.

So, all that stuff comprises understandable errors in your statement which we are pleased to be able to correct.

The second paragraph, though, is a little different.makes you sound like a raving Nazi nutter. Rounding up people and executing their leaders makes you appear demented, and we’re not really qualified to deal with that.

It makes you sound like a raving Nazi nutter. Rounding up people and executing their leaders makes you appear demented, and we’re not really qualified to deal with that.

Our advice would be to seek help from a professional.

Just in case you come across this post (and we hope you do) we’d love to know to which political party you feel an allegiance (although we think we can probably guess!).

Good wee piece here. Technically, I think it was the Liberal Democrats who pushed for the free care for the elderly when they were in coalition, and before they disappeared as a front line force in Scottish politics. (Well done Nick Clegg.) But the present government has continued to fund it.